Ideas inhabited in everyday materials

Starting with a very open project brief will help to demystify the creative process, says London-based designer Philippe Malouin. Indeed, experimenting with everyday materials, and with a minimum of intervention, design is not difficult: 'everyone can do it'. If you want to generate ideas, he continues, start making things out of any available material and try to experiment with as many concepts as you can. It's a very good start. Having lots of ideas, then, the next step is to evaluate from a functional point of view what could be actually interesting to put into production. And so, for example, on the theme of sustainability, and based on his salvaging practice, Malouin looks at the waste streams and modify them in order to make a new product, In this way, Malouin has created 68 works from junk steel.* In a reversal of the usual design process, function would follow form, designers try not to use any additional external materials. That is, Malouin proposes an instinctive approach to design, that is, not to think too much in front of a computer and just let the function and the materials influence the creative process. https://philippemalouin.com/

The shape of things: AI in design

AI is becoming an essential part of designers' tool set in generating images, models, design options and other forms of data. And this often by just a few keyboard prompts and clicking the AI button. However, the ease and flexibility of using AI, from the perspective of individualism and psychology, can be either positive, that is, it enhances creativity with less mental stress (cognitive offloading), or negative, that is, it risks over-reliance on algorithmic feedback (cognitive overloading). This paradox suggests the need to fully consider the design process - from first thoughts to final outcome - as a human experience while acknowledging that AI is both co-creator and design material in the process - not just a tool. That is, as our tooling shapes us, so does AI. Over-dependence on AI, then, may privilege the finished product over the design process. This highlights designer responsibility to think critically of the ethical, cultural, and creative implications of AI.  https://www.riba.org/work/insights-and-resources/professional-features/ai-professional-features/what-can-architects-learn-from-an-ai-in-education-report/

Design and artificial creativity

As AI infiltrates the world, design, as a discipline stands at the threshold of yet another paradigm shift. That is, can AI-driven ideation not only compete with but exceed human ideation, particularly for "routine" problem solving?* In this challenge, designers are exploring multiple directions and pathways while considering AI's creative role as well as its societal impact. It is a hybrid (analogue-digital) creative process which largely simulates human creativity although lacking several characteristics of it.† The design studio, then, is not a confined physical space for drawing and model making but a hybrid practise which blends traditional in-person studio experiences and computer simulations. The hybrid model, moreover, overcomes disciplinary boundaries using combinations of data (structured and unstructured), culture (man-made and biological), matter (organic and inorganic) and technology (analogue and digital) that stimulate and generate new creative perspectives which, in turn, impact ideation itself. Indeed, a paradigm shift. *‘Aha, I know what is going on here and this is what I need to do to figure out the answer.’ reaction to the problem. †AI does not use the same process as a human does when that human is thinking creatively. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000225